


i am not a ghost and you are not aquaman

by brella



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Asexual Character, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/F, Ghosts, Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 01:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2794205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucifer, errant ghost, reflects on life, love, and how fucking badly she wants a cigarette.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i am not a ghost and you are not aquaman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stitchingatthecircuitboard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchingatthecircuitboard/gifts).



> _Leave the party but you can't hear me you can no longer hear me. The dead are boring. Enlightenment is boring. We can read the minds of dogs. We make the black cats scatter across the grass. There is a better party where I am not a ghost and you are not Aquaman. I am like a ---, we are all of us --- aching to get back into our terrycloth robes. Gives me a headache, all this intellectual stimulation. It's cold out tonight. I am here by the back wall, in the museum of the afterlife. I would like to be a flickering cowboy. I like the live music-- we only get the recorded stuff here. I would like to be alive again. I would like to say something about grace._  
>  — Richard Siken

Fuck is really a beautifully versatile word. In your opinion, anyway. It's love and it's hate and it's joy and it's sorrow and it's you and it's Laura, every inch, but you suppose this observation won't be much use to Laura, now that you're, you know. Dead. 

You're not sad about it. Not even a little. Really. It had been grandiloquent and explosive (to use a literal turn of phrase) and undoubtedly traumatizing for all witnesses, which is all you could ever ask for. People are going to fucking  _remember_ it, if they know what's good for them. Nobody will ever forget you, not ever, and even if it's just because you'll be used as a warning story,  _don't be like Lucifer, children_ , it's still all the same. It still  _counts_. 

The angry, quiet girl smoking cigarettes out the kitchen window at two in the morning would be happy, you're sure. She would have cherished the certainty that she would not live up to her namesake, to be buried along with her name, nobody came. You still feel parts of her writhing heart in you, sometimes, now that you're a ghost with all the time in the world to spare floating around and _thinking about things_.

Mostly you think about Laura. Your demon, your friend. You follow her here and there like an idiot, watching her lie around and stare at the ceiling and at the cigarettes you'd left her and at her callused, shaking fingers. You watch her push her parents away. You watch her get sick whenever someone mentions your name, and you think, _well, isn't that sweet_. One time, in a moment of weakness very much unlike you (or unlike Lucifer, you suppose), you murmur to her, "I really cocked it up, didn't I?" and it manifests in a slip of paper falling off of her desk, which she barely even notices.  

And you look at her face and the slope of her mortal neck and the freckles and moles on her naked shoulders, and you watch when she lops all of her hair off, and you're disgusted by the cumbersome beat of your ghostly human heart, that sentimental shit organ of yours that you wish Annie had blown out along with your head. 

It hadn't hurt, not really, but thanks for asking. It had felt like a prickle of tinnitus as though a gun had gone off beside you and your whole brain had filled up with red life-stuff, blood maybe, and then you'd been gone and free, careening into nothing, into emptiness and dust, a whispered name on fearing tongues, a name that always slipped away into the morning fog. 

In some ways, you quite like being dead. 

In others, you don't. When you're dead, you can't smoke cigarettes because you can't touch them because you don't exist, and you can't sleep, either, because you're not even really awake; you float around aimlessly and watch people age, and you've got time to  _ponder_ things, to grapple with those pesky mortal sensibilities you had never quite shaken, like  _memories_ and  _regrets_ and  _wanting to do things over again_. Like remembering your favorite song when you were nine, or your favorite candy when you were twelve, or actually having friends, or feeling certain that your flimsy skeleton would snap and dissolve if you had to live one more _fucking_ day on this  _fucking_  earth that didn't know what you could  _be_.

You drift through fogged-up windows and you watch people having it off in their flats and you don't feel anything, because it's such a  _bore_ , such a desperate way to try to prove you're alive, so beneath you now. Then you go back to Laura's house, and will her to light the cigarette again with the divine thunder roiling within her. You watch awful television programmes with her, and wait on her bed with your lean legs crossed and your eyes closed when she showers. Rather like a friend would.  _  
_

Laura is a strange and special case. Laura, when she laughs, when she trips disembarking from the tube, when she flips the bird to cat-callers on her way home, makes you want to sing something. With strings, and stuff. With a message. But you're rubbish at it, always have been.

So you write cryptic messages in the fog on her bathroom mirror that fade by the time she looks up to brush her teeth, things like  _Hello sweetie_ and  _Mama there ain't no denyin' I've been flyin'_ and choice excerpts from "Sunshine of Your Love." You talk to her like she can actually hear you and feel like a tosser, and you try to set her whole house on fire once just by imagining it, because there's nothing better to do, nothing louder; you will make her look at you even if it means burning her down to pearly human bones, but you are not a god anymore, and fire needs oxygen to start. 

You are the wicked one, you think. Laura is divine. It's all rather mawkish for your tastes, but such is the nature of post mortem enlightenment and becoming nothing but ether and trifles you once called the thoughts and feelings that made you who you might have been before you became Lucifer and blah blah blah. That's all you've really got going for you now: thinking too hard about things. Maybe the thing you think the hardest about is what it would have been like if you had been a good girl and stuck around, how maybe you and her could have ruled the world together. 

And then you laugh at yourself. You laugh your phantom laugh and it becomes a breeze that rushes briefly through the room though none of the windows are open, and you think that regrets are not the devil's game. It's all just a load of rubbish, isn't it? A load of mortal rubbish. 

Winter comes to London, and Laura says your name in her sleep one night, and that's when you stop coming round. 


End file.
